Account security for consumer transaction accounts is often a major focus for financial institutions that issue transaction accounts, as well as the consumers themselves. Financial institutions often try to develop new technologies and ways to protect a consumer's account. At the same time, consumers will often select a financial institution or a financial product based on the level of security provided for their transaction account. As thieves and other nefarious actors continue to develop new ways to compromise transaction accounts, consumers and financial institutions similarly are always on the lookout for new and improved ways to protect their transaction accounts.
One method that consumers and financial institutions use to protect a transaction account is requiring authentication when a payment transaction is attempted. Commonly, the consumer attempting the transaction may be required to provide a personal identification number (PIN) or a signature, which may be used during the authorization process to authenticate the consumer as an authorized user of the transaction account. Unless the thief is able to identify the consumer's PIN or adequately forge their signature, they will be unable to use the consumer's transaction account, even if their credentials are stolen or reproduced.
Another method that consumers and financial institutions sometimes use is the splitting of a transaction account into multiple sub accounts, where each sub account has separate payment credentials, such as its own credit card, and can only access an assigned portion of the balance or credit of the transaction account. Thus, if a card is stolen, the thief can only access the amount tied to that subaccount, leaving the remainder of the account unavailable. However, traditionally subaccounts operate using placeholder credentials that are mapped to the transaction account. Payment transactions are thus processed using traditional methods, which includes authentication being performed using the authentication of the transaction account. As a result, a thief that steals the credentials for multiple subaccounts may only need to figure out a single PIN or forge one signature to access all of the associated funds. As such, the compromise of a single subaccount may still place the entire transaction account at risk.
Thus, there is a need for a technological solution to enable the customization of authentication for subaccounts of a transaction account, which may result in a significant increase to account security to the benefit of both consumers and financial institutions. Such a technological solution may overcome the problems with traditional account security methods that rely on a single method of authentication that is not adjusted and cannot be customized, particularly when multiple subaccounts may be used.